The SEO Apocalypse Has Arrived

For more than a decade, the digital economy operated on a beautifully simple premise: rank high on Google, get customers, and (hopefully) print money. Companies dumped billions into SEO like it was a reliable annuity.

Well, that annuity is past due and the foreclosure notice just arrived. It’s written in AI.

The most recent example?

In NerdWallet’s Q2 2025 earnings report, they shared that their credit card business is down 25% year over year, while the card category at large and competitors like Credit Karma have been growing.

Their explanation? "…more pronounced organic traffic challenges."

The carnage is everywhere.

What many are calling an "extinction-level event" for content-driven businesses is a reality seen in traffic dashboards and earnings reports across Wall Street.¹

This doesn’t feel like another algo update that will blow over. This is structural.

Google is systematically burning down (and rebuilding) the ecosystem that made digital content marketing initially viable, and they're doing it on two fronts.